Hearths of darkness: the family in the American horror film

Abstract

Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014)Meals have long been seen as a means of uniting family and friends. As the adage insists, 'the family that eats together, stays together.' Conventional, optimistic images of a family sitting down at the table tend to picture the family members sharing particular events that occurred during the day, asking and giving advice, and laughing. Norman Rockwell's 1943 classic painting 'Thanksgiving Dinner', part of his 'Freedom from Want' series, is a case in point. Rockwell's painting is a quintessential depiction of the American family happily celebrating an abundance of food and love together. This glossy depiction, however, is frequently inverted in horror film. One need only think of the parodic depiction of the Sawyer family sitting down to dinner with their 'guest' Sally in Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). For the Sawyers, it seems, 'the family that slays together, stays together.' Their world is one that celebrates violence and highlights the underside of the American Dream, one where consumer capitalism has forced people to live on the margins and eek out a meager living literally on the flesh of others.Within the horror-film genre, the Sawyer family is not unusual. We see similar scenes of family violence and discord throughout the history of the horror in film and television. Season One of FX's American Horror Story (2011) features not one but three dysfunctional families: the Harmons, the Langdons and the Montgomerys. The focus on the depiction of the family in horror in Tony Williams' book Hearths of Darkness (2014) (an updated edition of the original 1996 release) is therefore a welcome one. Much like critic Robin Wood, Williams' focuses in this book on horror as an internal rather than an external threat to the family.1Hearths is an interdisciplinary work that draws on, and combines, Freudian-Marxist theory with feminist critique. This criticism examines the ways in which patriarchal social structures construct repressive gender and societal roles, which by extension foster deviant behaviour in individuals. Williams grounds his argument by situating the films within their cultural and historical milieu. This provides a valuable context that highlights how the films reflect the socio-political period in which they were produced. He divides his work into twelve chapters plus an 'Introduction to the New Edition' and a 'Postscript'.Examining approximately 300 films, from the 1930s to the present day, Williams begins with Universal's classic Frankenstein films from the 1930s and Val Lewton's productions with RKO Pictures in the 1940s. However, he glosses over 1950s horror films for no apparent reason and moves straight to a discussion of 1960s horror, positing Hitchcock as a seminal influence on the overall genre of family horror. In other words, Williams situates the 1960s as the moment when the 'material factors behind horror become prominent' (p. 71). It is only with his discussion of 1970s horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Omen (1976), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), that Williams's real passion becomes evident. Williams states that '[t]he family horror films of the 1970s represented an important movement within a genre that then had the potential of operating as a powerful cultural counterforce influence to suggest the necessity for fundamental change in human society' (p. 4). He continues by contending that, from the end of the 1970s onward, horror becomes mostly a display of 'self-indulgent exercises in gore and special effects' (p. 5). His tendency to dismiss later films is unfortunate, given the many examples of distorted and deformed families represented in horror over the last thirty years, such as The Shining (1980), Poltergeist (1982), The Fly (1986), Near Dark (1987), The People Under the Stairs (1991), Vampires (1998), Insidious (2010), Sinister (2012), and House at the End of the Street (2012), to name but a few. …